After getting shot while on duty, a fair-minded street cop (played by that paragon of the sleazy 80’s lower tier LA cop movie Wings Hauser) ends up reluctantly assigned to a newly created right-wing Strike Squad only to watch its already violence-prone members turning not only even more maniacally dangerous, but suicidal as well… with him suddenly starting to exhibit signs of the same behaviour.

Taking a break from mostly churning out hardcore porn at the time (with titillating moniker gems as Between the Cheeks — gee, I wonder what section of porn that one falls under?), director Gregory Dark’s rare excursion into ‘straight’ cinema offers a surprising twist into sci-fi territory (with electronic ‘aggression releasing’ implants being surgically placed into the cops’ backs) and is enjoyably lurid, taking place as it does in the seamy underworld of LA vice (well, you weren’t expecting Dark to make a gentle romantic comedy, were you?). It has a really fun action set-piece with a pimp getting dragged at high speed from the car of a totally bonkers Strike Squad cop (who, along with going stark, wild-eyed crazy, also releases a lot of pent-up sexual yearnings by extensively fondling the handcuffed man’s groin), including some impressively hair-raising turns on busy streets. Nice to see crazy faced Brion James as a street preacher without much really to do in the narrative, other than show up on occasion speaking out against the decadent un-Godly filth he sees around him, as well as to conveniently set on fire one of the bad guys late in the movie.

There’s a lot of silly stuff throughout, with Hauser somehow barely noticing every man in the Strike Squad he’s introduced to openly fondling their weapons like they’re jerking off… and why the Hauser character’s girlfriend doesn’t bother to follow up on that unaccountably large post-surgery hole in Hauser’s back that looks like it’s clearly got some kind of device in it and instead just blindly accepts the shady female surgeon’s dismissal that it’s ‘nothing’, is beyond me.

Lots of crazy-time over-acting by the coppers gone nuts and, for anyone who knows about what a repulsive and insidious political operative G. Gordon Liddy was for President Richard Nixon (including doing jail time for heading the Watergate Democratic campaign office break-in), it’s more than a tad unsettling to watch this repugnant man shamelessly trade on his image as an uber-right wing reactionary by playing the (surprise) radical head of the clandestine operation working to create a killing machine police department to rid the world of ‘faggots, pussies, etc.’, while also hiring dominatrixes to spank and humiliate him. And if it wasn’t bad enough being reminded what a sleazy opportunist Liddy is, making a minor celebrity out of himself and his hate-filled image post-shady political career, even worse is that he can’t act for shit.

Looking past the bad taste from Liddy’s presence, though, Exhumed’s Ex-fest provided another glimpse at a fun, sleazy and wonky sci-fi cop movie I not only wouldn’t have seen otherwise, I’m pretty sure I would have never known existed.

Buck A Review